Harvard Students Forced to Withdraw in Cheating Scandal

Harvard University's Business School stands in Boston. Photographer: Brent Lewin/Bloomberg

Feb. 1 (Bloomberg) -- More than half of the students
implicated in a Harvard University cheating scandal that
involved about 125 undergraduates were told to withdraw for as
long as a year.

Of the remaining students linked to the probe, half were
given probation, Michael Smith, dean of the Faculty of Arts and
Sciences, said today in an e-mail to the Harvard community. The
school said in August that the students were under investigation
for inappropriate collaboration on a final exam.

“Every student contacted by the Administrative Board has
been informed of the disposition of his or her individual
case,” Smith said, referring to the school’s disciplinary body.
School leaders will “redouble our efforts” to promote academic
integrity, he said.

The cheating allegations at Harvard College, which has
about 6,700 undergraduates, led to criticism from students who
said the course’s rules on collaboration were unclear. The
magnitude of the scandal, which one official deemed
“unprecedented in living memory,” may have slowed the school’s
progress through the cases, said Robert Peabody, an attorney
with Collora LLP in Boston who represented two of the implicated
students.

“They’re saying they took the time to get it right and
make sure everyone had due process,” he said in a telephone
interview. “They could have been much more efficient.”

‘Laborious’ Process

Students found to have cheated could be told to withdraw
for two semesters, or receive a warning or be put on probation,
Jay Harris, dean of undergraduate education, said in August.

The review process is “laborious” and gives students
multiple opportunities to voice their views of the case, Smith
said today.

“The review of a case takes exactly as long as it needs to
take in order to ensure that a student receives a full and fair
review, conforming to the high bar that the Faculty has set for
the Board’s proceedings,” he said in the e-mail.

Many students went for months knowing that the
Administrative Board might tell them to withdraw immediately,
and their course work, along with tuition and room expenses for
the semester, might be wasted, Peabody said. While both the
students he represented withdrew during the semester because of
the risk of being forced to do so, only one was required to
withdraw, while the other was given probation, he said.

Tuition Refunds

“It was death by a thousand nicks,” said Peabody, a
former assistant U.S. attorney in Boston. “For the students who
decided to stay on and fight the allegations, it was living
torture.”

Because some of the cases were resolved in September and
others in December, Harvard said it would “create a greater
amount of financial equity” for students who withdrew in the
term by calculating tuition refunds for all affected students as
of Sept. 30.

The college formed a Committee on Academic Integrity 18
months ago that’s developing recommendations for promoting
honesty among students and determining practices for faculty to
follow, Smith said in the e-mail.

Griffin Gaffney, a Harvard senior majoring in social
studies, said he’s seen stronger, more detailed directives on
collaboration in his course materials.

“It’s a paragraph or half a page rather than a sentence,
and the professor always says something about it in class,” he
said in an interview.

Faculty Awareness

The scandal has raised the faculty’s awareness of the
importance of communicating with students about standards for
scholarship, said Ryan Wilkinson, a teaching fellow in the
history department.

“Without question, there was a lot of discussion from the
teaching side of the campus,” he said in an interview. “Even
at Harvard, people are human beings and this can potentially
happen.”

Students with knowledge of the situation have said the
course involved in the investigation was Government 1310:
Introduction to Congress. The scandal came to light when a
teaching fellow noticed similarities among a number of exams in
mid-May, and school officials followed up with a review of every
exam in the class.

Class ‘Culture’

While the instructions for the take-home final exam forbade
collaboration among students, students were accustomed to
working together in this and other courses, Peabody said.

Students aren’t permitted to discuss their disciplinary
cases publicly. Some have said anonymously that collaboration
was thought to be part of the “culture” of the class and was
noted in course reviews. One teaching fellow in the class worked
during office hours with groups of students to discuss questions
and answers to the final exam, Peabody said.

Tom Stemberg, a Harvard alumnus and co-founder of the
Staples Inc. office supply chain, said most of the blame lies
with the teacher and his management of the course. Earlier this
month, Stemberg wrote Harvard President Drew Faust to express
his unhappiness with the probe.

“Those students who cut and pasted exam answers deserved
to get kicked out,” Stemberg said today in a telephone
interview. “The rest of them should have been vindicated, and
the faculty
member fired.”

A call seeking comment from Matthew Platt, who taught the
government class, wasn’t immediately returned.

Comparing Exams

The board sent students copies of their exams, along with
the exams of other students -- with their names removed -- that
showed evidence of collaboration or plagiarism. The students
were required to write statements to the board that explained
similarities, a process that went into October in some cases.

Later, these students were required to meet with
subcommittees of the Administrative Board and were permitted to
see the statements of the students with similar exams, again
with identities removed. In their efforts to explain their own
actions, some students implicated their classmates by name,
Peabody said.

The subcommittees then reported to the full board with a
recommendation, Peabody said. Students were informed of the
recommendations before they went to the full board, he said.

Relatively early in the process, one of the students
Peabody advised decided to withdraw. The student sensed that the
Administrative Board would require him to withdraw at some
point, and the student wanted to preserve his eligibility for
varsity athletics, Peabody said.

The other student stayed at Harvard until just after
Thanksgiving before withdrawing. Her meetings with the
subcommittee were pushed back, she still hadn’t heard from the
full board, and the stress was too much for her, Peabody said.

Established in 1636 and with an endowment valued at $30.7
billion, Harvard is the oldest and richest U.S. university.
Alumni of the college include Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S.
Bernanke and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer
Lloyd Blankfein.